Where’s The Operatic Shakesepeare?

The Royal Shakespeare Company is staging the complete works of Shakespeare. So why don’t the operas based on the Bard get performed more often? There are “more than 400 operatic adaptations of the plays – 40 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream alone. The archive of Shakespeare in opera is also rich in aborted projects. Mendelssohn, Schumann, Glinka, Bizet and Prokofiev all dreamed of setting Hamlet.”